An example of what I mean:
I, in China, told an English speaking Chinese friend I needed to stop off in the bathroom to “take a shit.”
He looked appalled and after I asked why he had that look, he asked what I was going to do with someone’s shit.
I had not laughed so hard in a while, and it totally makes sense.
I explained it was an expression for pooping, and he comes back with, “wouldn’t that be giving a shit?”
I then got to explain that to give a shit means you care and I realized how fucked some of our expressions are.
What misunderstandings made you laugh?
A friend of mine was doing work-study in France and thought she was offering to show her coworkers her cat. Thankfully her coworkers informed her that she was being more than just friendly and how to actually offer to show her feline.
Strange how in polite French society, there are no female cats. Similar to rabbits in Spain…
Nor dogs in America
Well to preface this, 6 months ago I moved to Japan to study Japanese.
During a trip to Tokyo I randomly ended up talking to a group of salarymen on the way to the same restaurant at me in akihabara. After a while they asked me if I live in Japan and I answered yes and then proceeded to say 日本にしんでいる instead of 日本に住んでいる, for those who don’t speak Japanese, I accidentally said I am dying in Japan instead of I am living in Japan which is surprisingly close pronounciation wise lol. This was met with loads of laughs
To live and die in Japan, that’s the place to beeee…
My favourite story like that is from my dad, who was WW2 vet. After the war, he wound up in Japan and attended a conference where someone stepped up to the podium and introduced himself as General McArthur’s Chief Advisor. Or at least he thought he did…
The word for advisor is komon. The word for asshole or anus is koumon. Basically, you just hold out the first o out slightly longer and it switches to the other word.
I feel like this is too coincidental to be a coincidence.
Haha i am just starting to learn Japanese and I gotta say its challenging but so fun. I love the grammar, at least as far as I understand it at this point. Like Yoda’s grammar it is.
I used to have trouble with RPN calculators until I realized it’s better to think in Japanese.
For example, when I go:
3 enter 5 plus 2 divide
I’m thinking:
san to go tasi-te ni-de waru
It just feels more natural.
Some years ago I was learning Chinese, I was excited and eager to practice after learning only a couple phrases, so one day I see this young lady handing out flyers downtown, I confidently approach her and say “ni hao!” and she replies “I’m Korean”. To make things worse the flyers were actually from a Korean learning institute.
Chatting on Skype with a Chinese developer, he said “I need to take Friday off for family matters” and I said “no worries”
He apologized profusely, and eventually I realised that to him, “no worries” meant something like “No! I am very concerned!”
I’ve since taught them some more Australianisms.
Wait… I don’t get it either. He refuse the day off?
“No worries!” means “Yes, that’s fine, there is nothing to worry about.”
He thought it meant “No! You should worry about that!”
Instead of “No worries!” he heard "No, worries!*
Oh! I see. He midunderstood “no worries” with “No! Worry!”…
That one is also in the states lol.
So many developers reporting “oy ya cunt”, quite often not even aimed at them as an insult.
Haha I sim race with several Aussies and Kiwis and I’m quite happy to be called a cunt by them because it usually means I won. “'Ow in the fack did yiu get tha leed ya cunt!?”
“cunt” is a term of “endearment” in Australia lol. It’s a cultural clash that needs to be explained quite often. I saw a similar culture clash with polish devs working for a US company. Poles like to vent / complain about their life simply for someone to chime in and say “I feel you, shit sucks”. Once a colleague vented about a minor annoyance. 3 days later we had a meeting scheduled about “problems in the project”. We collectively went “what problems lol”. Everyone was pissing their pants only for the US scrummaster to bring up the tiniest of annoyances as if it meant the end of the world / company.
Haha I know its an endearment, since we’ve all been friends for years now. One thing that got me recently was one of them talking about the new whipper-snipper he just bought and how quiet it was, being electric.
I had no idea what the hell a whipper-snipper was, but know a “whippersnapper” means young person where I’m from.
Turns out a whipper-snipper is the same as a weed-whacker / weed-eater in my part of the world.
I have only ever heard the story, but my grandma came over here from Germany after WW2 to marry my grandpa (American Army) after they met in Germany.
Anyway, they are driving and she is learning English and she gets horrified and says, “THEY SELL THAT HERE?!”
My grandpa turns the car around and drive back to read the sign which had “pups for sale”. Because she was German and the U is usually pronounced with an OOH sound, well…she quickly learned how to say “pups” in English.
Quick addition: ‘Pups’ means ‘fart’ in German. A word used by and around children. Or if you have enjoyed an education.
Awesome! Thanks for sharing that trivia!
I am an English monoglot. Years ago, was working overseas in Kuwait when I experienced a sudden onset of testicular pain and swelling. Went to the hospital and got taken to an elderly Arabic ultrasound technician to examine my junk. After a few minutes of smearing cold jelly on me, he says something…in Arabic.
I do not understand.
He repeats it, this time poking me in the fupa.
I look confused and try to adjust my position on the table to give him better access, hoping this is what he wants.
He sighs, searching for the little English he knows. Finally he says, “Like pooping…but not pooping!” and wags his finger in my face. That’s how I understood he wanted me to tense my lower abdominal wall so he could check for a hernia.
To be fair, most English speakers probably wouldn’t know what to do if you told them the term in English, the Valsalva maneuver.
Sorry I don’t know how to dance the salsa.
My Dutch friend. We were on discord playing guild wars and the topic of alcohol came up. The majority of the group are british and we were talking about different drinks like whisky, gin etc and the question came up “so what famous dutch spirits are there?”.
There was a bit of silence before he said, “I don’t know, William of Orange?”. Turns out he had never heard of the word ‘spirit’ to refer to high proof alcohol before so selected a famous historical dutch figure.
The answer, of course is “jenever”.
The funnier answer is “witte wieven”
The majority of the group are british and we were talking about different drinks like whisky, gin etc and the question came up “so what famous dutch spirits are there?”.
In case you want an actual answer to that question, look up the history of gin.
This was a rather long time ago, my gin and oude en jonge jenever collection has rather grown since then lol
I could imaging a William of Orange rum. Bet it would taste pretty good.
He looked appalled and after I asked why he had that look, he asked what I was going to do with someone’s shit.
This is the shit.
No shit.
Are you shitting me?
I wouldn’t shit you. You’re my favorite turd.
Loose fit, but my family lived in Australia for a few years. We’re German. One night, my dad feels like a shake after a long drive to a vacation spot, so he drives up to a McDonald’s and orders, the rest of the family dozing in the car.
“One erdber shake, please.”
“Excuse me?”
“One erdber shake, please?”
“… I don’t understand.”
At this point my mum realized.
“Oh, a strawberry shake!”
We all have a bit of a laugh. He said the German word for strawberry, but pronounced it English. None of us in the car realized and we all understood. The lady in the drive through said she thought they invented a new flavor she didn’t know about.
He also swaps the th and s in Thous Australia. :)
Was in Spain on a Spanish club field trip. I forget what I did as it was years ago but I wanted to express how embarrassed I was about something.
Used the word ‘embarrasada’.
Hilarity ensued.
Edit: Oh look! Other people in this thread did the same thing lol. I feel so much better.
The Spanish word embarrasada means “pregnant” and not “embarrassed”.
my grandfather (polish) was talking to my cousin’s boyfriend at the time (german) in english. the poor guy was trying to make a good impression so he was really going the extra mile. it took about 10 minutes for them to realize one was talking about chess, and the other about jazz.
I don’t have an anecdote, but I do have a good joke.
Late at night, a German coast guard radio operator gets a distress call. A British ship has capsized and is quickly taking on water.
“We’re sinking, we’re sinking!!” The panicked sailor yells over the radio.
Confused, the German operator takes a minute then responds “What are you… sinking about?”
I know I am completely ruining the joke, however that is not even remotely proper radio protocol - and yes I am German, how did you know?
I had sort of the reverse, working with German-speaking coworkers. I used the term “schpiel” to refer to a long talk I was going to give. This led to a moment of confusion because that’s not what the word means in German. It means “game” or “play” and in the context they thought I meant to imply that I was not taking the speech seriously, or maybe wasn’t going to be completely honest. Almost like a con. That’s probably how the loanword first entered the English language, and its meaning has drifted over time.
The word spiel “schpiel” is of Yiddish origin. It comes from the Yiddish word shpil (שפּיל), which means “play” or “game” same as German.
Yiddish and German are like Spanish and Portuguese. They are of course different languages, but there is a lot of overlap in vocabulary. I don’t know which language was the vector for the word.
Its less a misunderstanding I had as I grew up with Chinese speakers, but it is always fun to take a new grad student/postdoc out to lunch or something similar.
Because every language has “filler words”. In English that is usually “uhm” or “like”.
In Mandarin? It is “that one”. 那个, Nèi ge.
And “nèi ge” sounds a LOT like the n-word. Fortunately I have found that most college towns and places that are used to an international community pick up on it pretty quick, but it is still REAL awkward when you get a side eye from a black person because this visiting scholar is trying to remember an English word.
Haha I heard that a lot over there. Its a similar sound to the phrase “this one” or maybe “that one”. they both end in ge, but one starts with a ne sound, if I remember correctly. This was a long time ago
From my Chinese bosses, they translated it as “that one/ looks like” apparently it has multiple uses depending on context.
